2008/2009

Having worked the first six and a half hours of New Years Eve, the proceeding 17 and a half were spent in rather a zombified daze, still...the 300 odd kilometer drive from Jasper to Banff, via Lake Louise remains possibly the most beautiful drive one can take (even when its swallowed by a terrifying blizzard). On the way we passed the frozen remnants of the Sunwapta falls and the Weeping Wall



















Spent the night in the elegant, luxurious and bewilderingly huge Banff Springs hotel/castle. Had a New Years dinner in the Bavarian restaurant there (and had the Wiener Schnitzel, very nice) before retiring to bed and an instant, total and exhausted oblivion at 10:30 (what a shame!)

Weather

The recent record-breaking low of -38 degrees celsius this past weekend has inspired me to add another button to the site, so any visitor can have a good long laugh.

Do you know what -30 feels like? It feels like pain, pure and simple.

The View from my Window II....

...Rocky IV edition.



(There's Elk in there somewhere)

Think of England...

...Bryan's pondering of Brit's blogtitle got me pondering; as someone who has left the UK, what do I think of when I think of England?

Rain, obviously, scowls (oh, in the land of the perpetual grin how I do miss a good British scowl), taking personal offence at the success of others, the Daily Mail and the Sun (also, harrumphing, righteous indignation and page three), being seperated from a busy high-street by less than a foot of pavement, pea-green hills, flat-caps and border-collies, wonderful little villages a stones throw away from the grimiest of urban centers, the Transport font (also the Johnston font), oh, and of course...fat, pink men who refuse to wear their England soccer shirts.

A tiny bit more on the BBC...

Are Jonathon Ross, Russel Brand and an answering machine really that important? Who else in the world produces stuff like this?

Mumbai - Bombay

Glad to see I wasnt the only one who didnt know that the name change of Bombay to Mumbai was a product of Hindu chauvinism, in the style of the Burmese junta's imposition of Myanmar instead of Burma.

Brought to mind a recent program on the Outdoor Life Network, in which a self-righteously ignorant young backpacker presented a half-hour long advertisement on behalf of the Burmese dictatorship, piously murmuring the imposed name throughout (the Y next to the M makes it seem more authentic, I suppose).

A late fall stroll